Archive for the ‘Methodologies’ category

A few days ago I was listening to an interview to an expert in the Kanban approach applied to software engineering. I’ve been reading about Kanban since a while now and I find it quite an interesting way to solve problems in the process of software production. The interview, though, raised some kind of existentialist questions in my head: the way the expert was talking was clearly oriented towards raising the curiosity into the listeners so to push them to buy his book. The expert was really careful not to go too deep in the details of the topic giving an overall uneasy impression.

On Thursday 25th March we had a presentation at ATTD in Ghent, Belgium, about “Acceptance Testing with an agile remote team”, describing a test case resulting from the last project we developed. The event has proven to be really interesting as it has provided many different views on the concept of Acceptance Testing and at the same time it has given a lot of good hints about software tools like Cucumber and JBehave. (more…)

It’s Christmas time at last and we are happy to wish you all the best for this holiday. This is actually our first Christmas and we took the chance to review our plans and see how we have been proceeding since we started.

Our customers are providing us precious feedback in fine tuning the CalAgile approach as we are keen to have it always shaped on real needs and not only on theories. On the other side, our first product is starting to be properly defined after an interesting phase of studies in the augmented reality field. (more…)

After many years in working on software projects I realized that the most common reason of misunderstanding the design of an application is the lack of context or to be more precise, the lack of a shared context among the participants to the meetings.

The chance of working with a distributed team according to the CalAgile approach highlighted the need of clarifying this aspect. According to this approach a representative of the software consultancy firm kicks off the project at the customer’s premises by setting up communication channels between the customer’s business-oriented team and the remote software-development team. This kind of organization requires a continuous rethought of the customer’s needs as the representative actively reports to the team the model they should build. (more…)

With this post I’ll complete the series about the Scrum Gathering in Munich. I started the third day of the conference by attending the presentation “Growing Self Organizing Teams” held by Harvey Wheaton of Supermassive Games (http://www.supermassivegames.com). Supermassive Games produces titles for the Sony PS3 and it was founded in 2008. After less than one year the company has already got nearly 60 employees.

The first presentation of day 2 was from Patric Palm, one of the founders of Hansoft (www.hasoft.se), the Swedish company behind a product with the same name meant to manage agile and lean projects. The title of the presentation was “Making Agile matter to the bottom line by understanding group dynamics”. An impressing thing is that Patric started Palm when he was slightly older than 20 and I found also interesting his experience in the Swedish military air force.

Second presentation of the day was “Good product owner panel discussion” moderated by Simon Bennet. A very interesting point made during this discussion regarded the prioritization of stories of the same importance belonging to the same Product Backlog but referring to different projects. A simple solution to such an issue is to reverse the question and consider instead what happens if that specific feature is not delivered. Sometimes replying to this question is much easier. (more…)